CONSERVATIVE COMMENTATOR PRAISES 2010’S MOVIES

CNSNews.com, a unit of the conservative Media Research Center that is generally a harsh critic of Hollywood’s output, has published an end-of-the-year commentary by Ben Shapiro, the young conservative columnist and radio talk-show host, that concludes, “Surprisingly, it’s been a good year for movies.” He notes that the best films of the year “tended to celebrate what’s right with Western civilization,” while those that flopped “tended to denigrate America and her allies.” Shapiro, however, rates not a Hollywood film but a British one, The King’s Speech, as the best film of the year. “This magnificent movie justifies the medium,” he writes. He rates Inception as the “most fun” picture of the year (“a treasure trove of mind puzzles and memorable imagery,” while Green Zone heads his list as the “least fun” picture of the year. (“Matt Damon goes to Iraq to show how evil America is.”) He makes no mention at all of the year’s top box-office attraction, Avatar, which many conservative critics have derided as leftist propaganda, or as John Podhoretz wrote in the Weekly Standard, a film that roots for “the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency.” Shapiro, however, concludes that in 2010, Hollywood began to produce “more pictures people actually want to see. And that means, overall, better films with better values.”